Wind Farming in Israel

Posted by Israel Industries press review of the week on janvier 3rd, 2013

Wind power? In Israel? Well, absolutely so, and a lot of it!

As Israelis, we have been brought up to be aware of the highly available solar radiation in Israel, along with the heritage of David Ben-Gurion and the water solar heater, however, when mentioning wind, which also stands for spirit in Hebrew, wind as a source of power is not in the awareness of the Israeli public. Wind power? In Israel? Well, absolutely so, and a lot of it! And as the technologies become more mature, the potential increases and becomes more and more economical, in fact it is so economical that international companies, experienced in installing wind power which could cover the demand of the whole country and its neighbors put together, are showing great interest in Israel and are willing to invest time and money because they KNOW what is the Wind Energy Potential here. There is no better way of validating this fact of wind energy availability in Israel, and all that is required is to have the patience to simply harvest, reap and market the fruits of wind power to the grid.

Wind energy serves as a primary renewable energy source. European countries already produce 10-25% of their electricity from wind. Germany produced 30 Giga-Watt of wind energy in 2011- 3 times the total power production of Israel! China plans to reach 100 Giga-Watt by 2015 and our neighbor- Egypt has a goal of over 7 Giga-Watt for 2020 -12% of the production capacity.

Israel has started with a modest goal of only 800MW allocated to wind, however, experts estimate the potential to be in the range of 3,000 MW

In the last few days, a call for proposals has been published by the inter-ministry committee assigned to evaluate requests for developing wind farms. The proposals have not been submitted yet, as the due date is January 20th 2013, however a short survey with leading wind power developers resulted in the intention to develop over 2,000 MW!

Regulations take a while longer in wind when compared to solar, with development stages requiring wind assessment campaign and environmental surveys but once the procedures are completed, the process of setting up a wind farm is a simple and quick process. Erecting a wind turbine of 3 MW is completed in less than a day – the equivalent of laying down 30,000 square meters of solar panels for the same 3MWs!

Not only does Wind Energy deploy land, which Israel is short of, in an economical way. Wind energy is the most economical energy production technology which does not require water. Producing 1 kilowatt-hour from nuclear power requires 2.3 liters of water, Electricity from Coal uses 1.9 liters per kilowatt-hour produced. Even solar panels require water for washing the panels – each 100MW of solar power requires 130 million liters of water for cleaning during its life span.

The electricity authority set the feed-in tariff for wind energy to be 0.49 NIS – the lowest of all renewable energy technologies as wind IS the most economical renewable wind resource in Israel.

I would like to take this opportunity to present the basic wind energy map of Israel, published here for the first time , thanks to 3TIER and its representative in Israel – Clean-Electric who prepared the map and allowed us to publish it.
I would also like to congratulate TechnoSpin- a member of the Israeli Wind Energy Association – IsraWEA, for its first grid connected wind project in Eilot region to be installed shortly.
The Israeli Wind Energy Association is heading a wind conference which will take place on January 29th,as part of the CleanTech exhibition, Key participants include international Wind energy companies, wind farm developers, Israeli companies developing wind energy related technologies, including Pentalum – a leading LiDAR for wind measurements, EVR motors and others.

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